I know people who get very loopy on a single dose of nyquil or dayquil - so much for the nondrowsy version of the drug. [I can’t take either form, ramps my pulse up uncomfortably.] I even know someone who gets loopy on motrin/ibuprofin <shrug> People have odd drug reactions. Look at kids who turn into little tasmanian devils on sedatives, or fall asleep on uppers. Naproxin is like popping chocolate M&Ms to mrAru and I, and codeine is like taking immodium with no pain relief at all. But I can do percocet all day long without getting stoned on it [but it worked on pain wonderfully back in the day.]
And I would love to live in your world where you don’t get into trouble taking sick days when you are sick … or at least enough of them to be non-contagious again.:rolleyes:
I actually started a successful company and we never did any drug testing. Like most others, I judge an employee by their performance, and could care less what they did on their own time. I think this is generally true for most high tech companies.
Truth to be told, the biggest productivity problem I’ve ever seen with people was because of hangovers, and I never noticed anyone having a drug problem. We once ran up a bar tab of $1500 for 20 people (the entire company at the time) at lunch when celebrating a record sales month (everyone got the afternoon off).
Back in the day when I worked at Hewlett Packard, we had about 6 company wide keggers in the year that I worked there. People used to get hammered!
I’d only ask for a drug test if I suspected an employee was under the influence at work. No pre-employment testing - I believe that those tests are a poor substitute for doing a thorough job of checking references and work history.
I think I feel the question is like “Would you follow your employees around looking over their shoulder to make sure they’re not goofing off”. Yes, sometimes you have to do that. And you have to make sure people are producing results. And if you have employ 5000 people, you may have to automate that process somehow, possibly. But if you make your CEO check off the clock for bathroom breaks, something is wrong, you can’t clock-watch to ensure you’re getting your money’s worth out of someone in that sort of role. And in a small, creative company (probably a technical start-up), EVERYONE is in that sort of role.
I feel like not showing up to work impaired is that sort of thing: not doing that habitually is such a low baseline that if you’re even thinking about it, you’re screwed, because you’ve obviously no way of testing whether the people working for you are doing the much more complicated things you’re asking of them.
Yes, there may be exceptions. If genuine research shows that this is likely to catch people who otherwise appear reliable, it may make sense. But firing people for doing perfectly legal things (eg. visiting amsterdam on the weekend) seems bizarre: I don’t think that people who’ve been within 50 yards of cannibis, or even harder drugs, are automatically awful people.
No, I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of America’s fine puritanical traditions and plantiff’s lawyers (probably more the former than the latter, but a goodly dose of each).
I would only test if the employee was involved in a work-related accident. If the employee turned out to be under the influence of anything, I would be absolved from paying worker’s comp. This actually happened to the ex husband of a friend of mine. He was paralyzed in an accident involving heavy machinery, but turned up positive at the time of the accident. He didn’t get a dime.
For me, it’s the distinction between mala prohibita and mala in se. (That class was quite a long time ago – I hope I’ve remembered how to spell those right.) Coming into work and answering phones at the reception desk while high is in the mala prohibita category: it’s illegal because someone wrote and passed a law making it illegal to be high and do pretty much anything. Driving while impaired is mala in se: it’s illegal because the act itself poses an immediate danger to the criminal and those around him.
Since it’s my business, I feel free to run things to my own ethical standards, to the extent allowed by law. No skin off my nose if you get fired for answering the phone like an idiot; I’ll just go hire someone else who either comes in sober or is capable of conducting business while stoned. If you use my company property to endanger others while doing something illegal, however, I am going to be ticked enough to not only fire you, but make sure you’re held responsible for anything that happens to my insurance premiums, and quite possibly do jail time if you are found guilty of an underlying crime.
Note that I wouldn’t necessarily demand a drug test after an accident, either – just that, if circumstances suggested it would be a good idea, I wouldn’t feel it was a breach of personal ethics to do so. I don’t think it would even cross my mind to do so unless the accident was something egregiously unsafe for actual people. I care much less about an accident where the only thing in danger is property.